CHAPTER X

SOME NEW FACTS AND THEORIES

There are a number of peculiar phenomena that come under no specific head or grouping at present; that is to say, they are infrequent or isolated instances which cannot yet be relegated to a specific class and labelled.

I have frequently come across hearsay evidence and been unable to find the original observer. In other cases the character or mentality of the observer has been such as to render the account entirely valueless from any point of view except that of sensationalism.

The result is that we are faced with an unusual case which remains mysterious, usually because opportunity for a thorough examination of the phenomena is lacking.

This is perhaps best illustrated by those cases of material phenomena which we class as Poltergeists.

The most recently recorded case was the Cheriton dugout,[45] but there are many others recorded and a good many more details of which have been suppressed for personal or economic reasons.

Ronald Grey has some interesting notes under this heading to which I will now turn.

The distinguishing characteristics of a poltergeist haunting are aimless violence and mischief accompanied by the displacement and turning about of material objects and unaccompanied by any visible materialization of the manifesting entity.

In many cases these mischievous phenomena are associated directly or indirectly with children or young persons. Sceptics usually attribute the phenomena to pure mischief and a desire to mystify or be revenged on somebody by the child, but I do not hold that this is the true interpretation.

The actual power of physical mediumship is a gift which is in some strange way connected with physiological conditions. It is often more marked in ill-health than when well and sometimes vanishes completely or may return again after a year or two.

It has now been ascertained that the site of the haunting is the functioning factor and that one or other of the humans present is the often unconscious medium. If a known physical medium is substituted for the original one the phenomena will often be as effectively reproduced. The doctrine held by Spiritualists that a poltergeist is a low type of spirit essentially non-human and akin to the tree dryads or earth or air elementals does not seem to be borne out in practice.

Just as many people hold that the bulk of harmless as distinct from malignant apparitions are “thought-impressions” on the surrounding walls which become visible to people with the gift of clairvoyance, so are there some grounds for believing that the poltergeist manifestations are due not to any directing intelligence at all but to the permanence of some old act or thought which still has in some cases the power of influencing matter.

Mind cannot affect matter without the influence of a human intermediary. But the physical medium is a human intermediary and serves as a dynamo or battery for the generation of a necessary force.

Just as table levitations and similar phenomena are produced by the extrusion of psychical rods or levers which are invisible,[46] but which are directed to a definite task by intelligence, so the poltergeist phenomena seem to be similar phenomena but without any directing intelligence.

This statement needs qualification in the cases where the child medium has become partly aware that in some strange way he or she is the prime motor for the phenomena. Then the child’s mind consciously or subconsciously directing the impulse may focus the manifestation in the way of impish, malicious tricks afflicting an individual.

The “psychic force” or psychoplasm extended by the medium is very closely akin to what is termed “animal magnetism”--it seems to be of nervous origin and physiologically connected with internal secretory organs.

A slight nervous derangement of one of the many complexes associated with the age of puberty may quite conceivably endow occasional children with a transient power of physical mediumship.

The next point is the accumulatory effect of surroundings. Here we are very much in the dark, but the manifestations do not occur unless physical limits, such as walls, are present. In a poltergeisted house two unconscious agents of the activities may, particularly while asleep, but also while awake, saturate the surroundings with this peculiar form of energy.

There is nothing to show that this vitality ceases with death; it certainly continues during the state of sleep, and if it is borne in mind that even when the soul has passed from the body after death, life--that is to say, intense bacterial activity--continues, it is conceivable that the continued extension of this force may continue from unascertained physiological conditions, and so explain some of the baffling and distressing phenomena that have occurred in vaults and given rise to the theory of bodies being buried alive in a cataleptic condition.

More advanced students will see in the foregoing hypothesis the explanation of certain obscure texts relative to the Egyptian processes of embalming, and other religious rituals in connection with the disposal of corpses. The ancients were keenly aware of certain monstrous after-death possibilities which the moderns ignore.

This, then, is where the theory of poltergeist manifestations splits. They are often traceable to

(_a_) Unconscious physical mediums, usually adolescents.

(_b_) In certain difficult cases the human element has been eliminated, and the only hypothesis is the sudden manifestation of a latent force derived from the dead.

It should be remembered that the graves of saints become shrines and that miracles are attributed to them, and that certain most terrible vampire phenomena are associated with some unsanctified graves.

Just as the hair and nails of some corpses continue to grow to extravagant lengths long after death, so in certain cases it seems as if the corruption of the flesh were accompanied by a translation of the residual vital force or nervous energy--as distinct from soul or consciousness--into free psychic power.

This energy can apparently be stored in matter such as walls, wood, etc., and seems to have the quality of remaining latent until some unknown cause begins to change it from a static to a “dynamic” condition.

The sorcerer who produces earth from a particular grave and who treasures unholy mortal relics of evil man, is practising more than a mere symbolism. He is using matter whose very body may be impregnated with that peculiar essence or force which is the vehicle of all psychic phenomena.

People who are interested in serving the Powers of Evil have sedulously propagated the idea that, however malignant astral powers may be, there is a law that they cannot harm or injure mortals. This is one of those dangerous statements that Spiritualists make use of without knowing what they are talking about. These powers can be and often have been applied to the most sinister purposes. Utilized by anyone with occult knowledge and experience they are pregnant with soul- and body-destroying capacities, and it is fair to say that certain other occult powers are the least defence against them.

I am inclined to favour the theory that in all cases of poltergeists, where non-human sources of power are indicated, careful psychic analysis will reveal some inanimate matter which has been in contact with either evil-living mortality or the dead, and is serving as the focus and reservoir of the force. The power appears to be sporadic and cumulative, but it can be destroyed or dissipated both by material and by occult means if it can be traced to its source.

The latent cumulative effect of such an evil relic may possibly stimulate the extension of psychoplasm by unconscious mediums brought within its sphere of influence. This seems indicated where an exchange of physical mediums in the one centre of inflection has produced parallel results. There is also some ground for supposing that the phases of the moon affect the manifestation.

It is, of course, fashionable to deride the moon, but any seaside doctor will admit that his patients die with the ebb of the tide; and, further, it is highly illogical to suppose that an influence which can affect the vast masses of the tides is without its influence on the tenuous fluids of vitality.

The lunar effect is probably due to a screening or projection of specific solar or ethereal vibrations below the range which we see as light and colour and above that which we recognize as electrical phenomena.

“The simple undirected energy display of a poltergeist phenomenon may be converted into a specifically malignant phenomenon. The energy may be used to form a vehicle for an evoked elemental succubus or incubus, or might under certain different conditions be similarly utilized to accommodate or materialize a ‘familiar’ of a higher order,” says Duchesne, writing of some researches carried out in the Var, “but I am still at a loss to know what induces the phenomena to appear with such fulminant energy and purposeless commencement.”

* * * * *

A peculiar case of poltergeist occurred in Hertfordshire last spring.[47] The farm bailiff of a home farm complained that his cottage, which looked out on the yard of the farmstead, had become intolerable. Crockery was smashed on the dresser, pots and pans flew about while nobody touched them, and when the whole family were at midday lunch in their living-room a kettle of boiling water which was simmering on the kitchener hob was brought through an adjoining open door and slammed down among the diners at the table without spilling a drop.

Stones were thrown, windows broken, and even bedclothes snatched off. I went down in response to an invitation by the owner of the estate and soon convinced myself that the phenomena were authentic.

The family consisted of the bailiff, his wife, a girl of fourteen, and a son of twenty. The latter was not much in the house, being about on the hills with the sheep, as it was lambing time.

Previous experience led one to suspect the girl, who seemed quite honest and very frightened at the occurrences. My host and I were personal witnesses of flying stones and still more remarkable the scattering of a big sheaf of straw.

The sheaf was being carried from the barn to the cow-house by the girl herself at about three in the afternoon. We were talking to the bailiff’s wife. Suddenly the girl stopped and the big bundle of straw seemed to be lifted out of her arms at least two feet above her head. It balanced for a moment or two like a captive gas balloon, then whirled into thousands of separate straws which flew all about the yard.

No conceivable trick of wind--and it was a wettish, windless day--nor any human effort could have accomplished it. The truss burst like a shell, some of the straws flying right over the roofs of the outbuildings.

The terrified girl burst into tears and ran to her mother for comfort and protection.

That night we sent the girl away, and though manifestations continued for another two days, these were of decreasing violence.

The cottage was only a few years old and no deaths had occurred there, but the farmstead was a very old one, the estate having a connected history to pre-Tudor times. I was puzzled to find any clue to the exciting cause of the trouble.

I went over the whole place most carefully, but found nothing to guide me, and at last turned my attention to the structure of the cottage. A certain intuition or psychic susceptibility led me to suspect one of the big kitchen rafters which supported the ceiling of the kitchen and the floor of the girl’s room.

On inquiry I found that the architect who had designed the new buildings had employed a local contractor and used old red bricks and old timber wherever possible in order to preserve the old fashioned effect given by weathered colours.

It was not difficult to trace the material; the local contractor’s foreman told us at once where it had come from.

“It stood in our yard here for ten years or more before we put it into the new buildings,” said the foreman, “and it come to us when we pulled down Blackley Old Grange.”

“What kind of a place was that?” said I.

“Private madhouse at the last,” he answered. “The owner was a doctor and he went mad and hanged himself, he did, after killing one of the patients a month before. He hanged himself just before the visitors was expected to see the patient he had killed.”

* * * * *

Research carried us no further, except that I learnt that the murdered patient lay for a month in the room in which she was killed before the crime was found out, after the man’s suicide. It was impossible to trace the beam to its position, but I gathered that the doctor hanged himself from a window bar or curtain hook, not from the beam.

I am inclined to believe that the absorption of force takes place from prolonged contact with the emanation of the dead rather than from the transient impression of conscious thoughts, but there was no further recrudescence of the trouble when an iron girder was substituted for the beam, and the girl, when brought back, was perfectly normal.

I experimented with the girl later, but did not find that she possessed any marked gifts, although she was indubitably a good hypnotic subject. The beam, or rather a section of it, I secured for the purposes of research, the remainder was burnt.[48]

* * * * *

Another puzzling if popular subject is that of spirit photographs. I have handled scores of them, but have never yet come across one in which all possibility of ingenious fraud has been entirely eliminated.

Certain people have claimed peculiar gifts, but in no case has a satisfactory result been obtained at a genuine test-séance, where scientific precautions have been observed.

If anyone has this gift it can be demonstrated easily. The studio must be neutral ground--that is to say, the room must not be the claimant’s habitual studio. The camera must be provided by the testers, as also the dark slide and plates. The medium must be stripped perfectly naked and the same rule should apply to the testing committee if it includes anyone known to the medium. He should not be allowed to touch plates, dark slide, or camera except when naked and under close scrutiny.

Development should be carried out under test conditions at the nearest chemist’s dark room.

There is no known spiritual law which should lead us to think that a psychograph or spirit photograph is a possibility, and until the matter has been tested by a properly qualified body of men all such photographs are open to the gravest suspicion.

Money-making is not the only motive for fraud, and many of the fakers are often more anxious to build up a bogus reputation for “mystery working” than to make a direct profit on the transaction.

The avenues of fraud are so numerous that it is only possible to indicate a few of the methods adopted to deceive the credulous.

The spirit photograph is deemed to be genuine if it is taken under conditions which an average expert photographer holds to be fraud-proof. The weakness of the whole case lies in the fact that they cannot be obtained under genuine scientific, as opposed to amateur, test conditions.

In a word, the spirit image is imprinted on the negative under conditions not normally suspected by the photographers.

There are several methods of attaining the result, even when the photographer brings his own plates and dark slides and his own camera.

_First_ is the background trick. An acid solution of sulphate of quinine is invisible to the eye, but shows in the photograph. “Phenomena” painted on the wall or near by the objects appear in the photograph though invisible to the eye.

_Second_ is the contact process by which a small negative of the “spirit” face is mounted on a background of card prepared with radioactive salt solution. Many of these salts are rich in infra-red rays which will project an image through a metal dark slide. The “medium” has only to handle the dark slide during the sitting or the plate in the dark room previous to development, in order to make a contact image.

A cruder variation of this, the electric pencil flashlight with a rubber cup over the end containing the “spirit face” negative contact with the exposed plate, is achieved in the dark room. The instrument lies hidden in the medium’s sleeves.

_The third method_ is that most commonly used. The “spirit image” is projected through a minute lens in a hole in the wall of the studio. The beam of light is sometimes passed through a prism series in order to allow a room parallel to the studio to be used for the purpose of projecting, and it is possible for the apparatus to be arranged inside a piece of furniture in the studio.

The sitter usually has his back to the source of the projection and the “medium” takes the photograph and makes the exposure, so the fraud is childishly easy.

Even expert photographers are fooled by this trick, as they are satisfied that if plates, slide, and camera are not tampered with, fraud is impossible.

When stereoscopic cameras with twin lenses are used the fraud is manifest. Sometimes the fakers try hard to get an image into each half of the plate, but never are the “spirit images” in the same relative position or plane.

If the sitters are well-known it is not difficult for photographs of deceased relatives to be obtained and the spirit negative made from the photograph. In many cases reproduction of newspaper halftone blocks have been found on so-called spirit pictures. These show the diamond patterns of the screen and are obvious fakes, but are accepted by many uncritical believers.

In the case of an unknown sitter, strange blurred faces or perfect strangers are thrown on to the plate and excused as “guardian angels.”

When the medium’s own apparatus or dark room is used there are endless ways of faking, but it is these methods of faking an image without raising the ordinary photographer’s suspicions that are interesting.

The whole business is a cruel and heartless fraud, but the dupes are not really deserving of pity. If there was a word of truth in the claim of “spirit photographers” the testimony of an official test by a reputable committee of the Royal Photographic Society would settle the question once and for all.

Myths and legend have grown up round spirit photographs till Spiritualists have at last come to believe in their genuineness. Yet the whole of their belief rests on nothing stronger than the “miraculousness” of a conjuring trick. A good sleight-of-hand expert can accomplish card or other tricks which seem perfectly inexplicable to the layman, but we do not acclaim them as evidences of spirit power because we are deceived by them.

The spirit photographers deplore and avoid investigation by really efficient scientific men. They welcome the amateur with half-knowledge, as his very cocksureness renders him an easier dupe. He concentrates on the obvious roads to fraud, ignoring those which lie without the slender realm of his knowledge.

The phenomena of what may be called lightless photography were long ago described by Dr. Gustave le Bon,[49] who describes instantaneous photography by “Black-light.” Incidentally a common incandescent gas mantle possesses quite enough radioactive properties for ordinary experiments.

It is only by the destruction of fraudulent phenomena that the phenomena will be rightly understood and generally accepted. The Spiritualist who accepts and bolsters up dubious phenomena does far more harm to his own cause than the most pronounced sceptic.

The main point about spurious spirit photography is this. It claims that mechanical chemical relations are produced by spirit agency--yet though this chemical reaction is said to be produced with ease by certain individuals and circles, it flinches from facing a simple test which would, if proved to be true, convert the bulk of the sceptical world to an acceptance of the truth of spirit photography.

I have met many credulous folk who cherish blurred plates, obvious double exposures, “accidents,” such as imperfectly cleaned plates and even the most blatant swindles. Nothing can shake their convictions--but credulity does nothing to _prove_ fact.

Mr. Gambier Bolton has experimented for years with spirit photography, but has so far obtained nothing except plates bearing indications of a radiant energy similar to the N-rays of Becquerel. Many expert photographers interested in psychic matters agree that the true spirit photography does not exist and a canvass of both press and studio photographers who are experts in their profession reveals the same unhesitating expression of opinion. The same opinion is held not only by the professional and technical lay element, but by occultists and students of research whose standard of psychic knowledge is infinitely higher than that of the Spiritualists.

* * * * *

The aura which surrounds the human form is visible to certain people, but the faculty for seeing the aura does not necessarily involve the possession of any psychic gifts at all and is often an indication of a slight degree of colour-blindness.

The ordinary photographic plate represents colours differently to their relative values as seen by the human eye, and in order to get the true effect certain dyes are mixed with the emulsion of the plates, or dyed screens which eliminate certain rays are interposed between the lens and the object.

The normal individual cannot see the aura, but a simple chemical device will put him on a par with the best natural aura discerner.

If a narrow glass trough or an oblong clear crystal glass bottle is filled with a dilute solution of the dye di-cyanin[50] which dissolves readily in absolute alcohol; that is all the apparatus necessary.

The subject whose aura is to be inspected should be placed against a black or neutral background opposite a source of illumination, preferably a north-facing window.

The observer then takes the bottle of blue solution and gazes through it at the clear sky for a period of some minutes. This serves to eliminate the retinal impression of certain of the normal light rays and renders the observer’s eyes sensitive to vibrations or rays not normally perceptible and stimulates an abnormal acuteness of vision.

The room should now be entirely darkened, and as soon as the eyes have recovered their “owl sight” the body of the subject will be seen to be surrounded by an envelope of vibratory exhalations whose colour varies with different individuals and changes under stress of emotion.

Suggestion or hypnosis exercises very peculiar effects on this aura, which would seem to be, if not an ectoplasm a psychoplasm in itself, yet the invisible vehicle which is capable of being separated from the material body and forming the astral body.

The aura vibration and the Becquerel or N-rays are closely connected, and the scientific hypothesis suggests that these rays are in the scale just above the infra-violet.

The simple instrument indicated above has certain therapeutic values in the diagnosis of illness, but is also invaluable for the psychic analysis of hauntings, cases of unconscious mediumship, and other matters.

FOOTNOTES:

[45] See _The New Revelation_. Sir A. C. Doyle.

[46] For details of leverage, etc., see: _The Reality of Psychic Phenomena and Experiments in Psychical Science_. By W. T. Crawford.

[47] Author’s note, 1912.

[48] Valuable data were gained by experiment with this disastrous relic. They are not suitable for publication at this stage, and I learnt recently of similar objectionable attributes associated with a battlefield souvenir from near Ypres.

[49] _The Evolution of Forces._ Gustave le Bon.

[50] Used in colour screen making for photography, and poisonous. Some glasses used in bottle making are not suitable, but a trial of one or two suitably shaped ones will always reveal one that works all right.